On Sun, 16 Feb 1997, Stephen Jones wrote:
> It should be pointed out to newer Reflectorites that Gordie's
> "cousin's wife, Friderun Ankel-Simons" is the wife of noted
> anthropologist E.L. Simons, whose co-discovery of Ramapithecus was
> adversely affected as a human ancestor by the use molecular clock
> data:
Thanks, Stephen, for the nice words. My cousin Elwyn is the famous Simons
in the family. However, I should point out that he had nothing to do with
"discovering" Ramapithecus. He tells me that he was four years old when
the first suggestion was made that Ramapithecus was part of human lineage.
His "co-discoverer," by your reckoning, Pilbeam, was Elwyn's student, and
not yet born.
It was interesting to read Richard Leakey's account that you sent along:
> "The debate raged for more than a decade, during which time more and
> more molecular evidence was produced by Wilson and Sarich and also
> independently by other researchers. The great majority of these new
> data supported Wilson and Sarich's original contention. The weight
> of this evidence began to shift anthropological opinion, but the
> change was slow. Finally, in the early 1980s, discoveries of much
> more complete specimens of Ramapithecus-like fossils, by Pilbeam and
> his team in Pakistan and by Peter Andrews, of London's Natural
> History Museum, and his colleagues in Turkey, settled the issue (see
> figure 1.1). The original Ramapithecus fossils are indeed human-
> like in some ways, but the species was not human. The task of
> inferring an evolutionary link based on extremely fragmentary
> evidence is more difficult than most people realize, and there are
> many traps for the unwary. Simons and Pilbeam had been ensnared in
> one of those traps: anatomical similarity does not unequivocally
> imply evolutionary relatedness. The more complete specimens from
> Pakistan and Turkey revealed that the putative humanlike features
> were superficial. The jaw of Ramapithecus was V- shaped. not an
> arch; this and other features indicated that it was a species of
> primitive ape (the jaw of modern apes is U-shaped). Ramapithecus had
> lived a life in the trees, like its later relative the orangutan, and
> was not a bipedal ape, still less a primitive hunter-gatherer. Even
> diehard Ramapithecus-as- hominid anthropologists were persuaded by
> the new evidence that they had been wrong and Wilson and Sarich had
> been right: the first species of bipedal ape, the founding member of
> the human family, had evolved relatively recently and not in the deep
> past." (Leakey R., "The Origin of Humankind", Phoenix: London,
> 1994, pp7-8)
For fun, I gave Elwyn a call, for comments, and got a fairly different
reading on this part of anthropological history. Since we spoke for over
an hour, I will not try to summarize what he said. But it seems pretty
clear that the real killer of the human-lineage suggestion was not
molecular-clock data, as Leakey suggests, but better fossil data.
Please permit me a small, somewhat amusing, anecdote:
I visited Elwyn many years ago when he was on the faculty at Yale. (He is
now at Duke.) Elwyn introduced me to Pilbeam, at work in his research lab.
With some prompting from Elwyn, he was induced to make his way over to a
specimen drawer to pull out what was then the best Ramapithecus fossil in
the world - perhaps 6 million years old - as I recall, a couple of teeth,
still within a small fragment of jaw - and highly prized. Elwyn discussed
it and handed it to me for my inspection. As we became involved in further
conversation, I continued to hold it. While Elwyn was perfectly relaxed,
I can still remember Pilbeam's nervous and watchful eye on that stranger
in his mist who held the "crown jewels." Such is the importance of fossil
data in his field.
One final point: Elwyn assures me that no suggestion was ever made that
Ramapithecus was bipedal.
Gordon Simons